Susan Orlean famous quotes

Living in a rural setting exposes you to so many marvelous things - the natural world and the particular texture of small-town life, and the exhilarating experience of open space.
-- Susan Orlean

#Space #Texture #World

The world is so huge that people are always getting lost in it. There are too many ideas and things and people too many directions to go. I was starting to believe that the reason it matters to care passionately about something is that it whittles the world down to a more manageable size. It makes the world seem not huge and empty but full of possibility.
-- Susan Orlean

#Believe #Ideas #People

You have to simply love writing, and you have to remind yourself often that you love it.
-- Susan Orlean

#Writing

Libraries are what is best about us as a society: open, exciting, rich, informative, free, inclusive, engaging.
-- Susan Orlean

#Library #Rich #Exciting

One of the very best reasons for having children is to be reminded of the incomparable joys of a snow day.
-- Susan Orlean

#Children #Snow #Joy

The old orchid hunter lay back on his pillow, his body limp... 'You'll curse the insects,' he said at least, 'and you'll curse the natives... The sun will burn you by day and the cold will shrivel you by night. You'll be racked by fever and tormented by a hundred discomforts, but you'll go on. For when a man falls in love with orchids, he'll do anything to possess the one he wants. It's like chasing a green-eyed woman or taking cocaine... it's a sort of madness...
-- Susan Orlean

#Falling In Love #Night #Men

An ordinary life examined closely reveals itself to be exquisite and complicated and exceptional, somehow managing to be both heroic and plain.
-- Susan Orlean

#Ordinary #Heroic #Complicated

There's a marvelous sense of mastery that comes with writing a sentence that sounds exactly as you want it to.
-- Susan Orlean

#Writing #Mastery #Want

Even after I'd published three books and had been writing full-time for twenty years, my father continued to urge me to go to law school.
-- Susan Orlean

#Father #Book #Writing

Everything rational and sensible abandons me when I try to throw out photographs. Time and time again, I hold one over a wastebasket, and then find it impossible to release my fingers and let the picture drop and disappear.
-- Susan Orlean

#Trying #Impossible #Photograph

Election Day outside of big cities is different. For one thing, there are so few people in my town that each individual vote really does matter, and several local races have been decided by as many votes as you can count on one hand.
-- Susan Orlean

#Race #Hands #Cities

There's a marvelous sense of mastery that comes with writing a sentence that sounds exactly as you want it to. It's like trying to write a song, making tiny tweaks, reading it out loud, shifting things to make it sound a certain way... Sometimes it feels like digging out of a hole, but sometimes it feels like flying. When it's working and the rhythm's there, it does feel like magic to me.
-- Susan Orlean

#Song #Reading #Writing

The one thing I've discovered about social media is that people love answering questions. In fact, it sometimes feels like at any given moment, millions of people are online who have been waiting for exactly the question you fire off.
-- Susan Orlean

#Media #Fire #People

When it comes to consumer electronics, I'm a big fat sucker, because even though I know you should never, ever buy anything until the second version of it is released, I just can't resist. I live in a state of perpetual Beta.
-- Susan Orlean

#Electronics #Bigs #Beta

'Brave' is one of those words that has been bleached of most of its meaning these days, thanks to far too many appearances in the glaring light of ad slogans and corporate public relations. I never thought about anything as brave anymore; it just seemed like a flabby, glib cliche.
-- Susan Orlean

#Light #Brave #Thanks

I remember, when I was a kid, watching my mother jam herself into her girdle - a piece of equipment so rigid it could stand up on its own - and I remember her coming home from fancy parties and racing upstairs to extricate herself from its cruel iron grip.
-- Susan Orlean

#Mother #Party #Kids

Unlimited choice is paralyzing. The Internet has made this form of paralysis due to option overload a standard feature of comfortable modern life.
-- Susan Orlean

#Choices #Modern Life #Internet

Why, I wonder, should the popularity of a news story matter to me? Does it mean it's a good story or just a seductive one?
-- Susan Orlean

#Mean #Seductive #News

Oversized houses, like oversized cars, seem to be a particularly American fixation.
-- Susan Orlean

#Car #House #Fixation

On the very same day that I ordered an iPad 2, I went shopping to buy myself a letter opener. I like to cover all my bases.
-- Susan Orlean

#Shopping #Ipads #Letters

Knowledge is a beautiful thing, but there are a few things I wish I didn't know.
-- Susan Orlean

#Beautiful #Wish #Beautiful Things

The thing is, I have a zillion apps, and I'm always looking for the perfect arrangement for them, so scrambling my home screen is part of that eternal quest.
-- Susan Orlean

#Home #Perfect #Quests

We do a lot of bird-watching up in the country, but we almost never have a chance to people-watch. There simply aren't enough human beings up here: there is nowhere you can park yourself with a cup of coffee and observe the species on parade.
-- Susan Orlean

#Country #Coffee #People

Every corny thing that's said about living with nature - being in harmony with the earth, feeling the cycle of the seasons - happens to be true.
-- Susan Orlean

#Feelings #Earth #Corny

There will always be vain, obsessive people who want to own rare and extraordinary things whatever the cost; there will always be people for whom owning beautiful, dangerous animals brings a sense of power and magic.
-- Susan Orlean

#Beautiful #Animal #People

When I heard about the Microsoft Kinect, though, I felt an urgency rising in me. A game you played without touching any machinery? A chance to wave your hands around, Minority-Report style, and move things around on a screen? This sounded like almost too much fun, with gadget-y pizzazz that sounded astonishing.
-- Susan Orlean

#Fun #Moving #Hands

When I still lived in Manhattan, people-watching was my hobby, and I spent many Sunday afternoons eating up the scene from a window seat at a Starbucks on Broadway.
-- Susan Orlean

#Sunday #People #Hobbies

When my son was born, and after a day of lying-in I was told that I could leave the hospital and take him home, I burst into tears. It wasn't the emotion of the moment: it was shock and horror.
-- Susan Orlean

#Lying #Home #Son

Orchid hunting is a mortal occupation.
-- Susan Orlean

#Hunting #Orchids #Occupation

To my great surprise, Twitter is not housed in a silver pod that orbits Earth at supersonic speeds, vacuuming up and then dispersing digital bits of worldwide chitchat; it's in a big, bland office building in downtown San Francisco, near a bowling alley and an Old Navy.
-- Susan Orlean

#San Francisco #Office #Navy

College athletics are so entrenched and enjoyed by so many people that they will never be discontinued or substantially changed. I know that. I just pity the people caught in that tender trap. And most of all, I pity those kids.
-- Susan Orlean

#Kids #College #People

Borders had lousy management and made bad corporate decisions, so its fate is less like a terrible accident than a slow-motion slide into a ditch, but it's hard to be happy about a bookseller's demise.
-- Susan Orlean

#Fate #Decision #Demise

When I was a kid, phone calls were a premium commodity; only the very coolest kids had a phone line of their own, and long-distance phone calls were made after eleven, when the rates went down, unless you were flamboyant with your spending. Then phone calls became as cheap as dirt and as constant as rain, and I was on the phone all the time.
-- Susan Orlean

#Distance #Rain #Kids

Keeping animals, I have learned, is all about water. Who even knew chickens drank water? I didn't, but they do, and a lot.
-- Susan Orlean

#Animal #Water #Chickens

I teach a non-fiction writing class at New York University, and one of my great pleasures is deciding on the syllabus.
-- Susan Orlean

#New York #Writing #Class

I remember three- and four-week-long snow days, and drifts so deep a small child, namely me, could get lost in them. No such winter exists in the record, but that's how Ohio winters seemed to me when I was little - silent, silver, endless, and dreamy.
-- Susan Orlean

#Children #Winter #Ohio

I have no idea how to get in touch with anyone anymore. Everyone, it seems, has a home phone, a cell phone, a regular e-mail account, a Facebook account, a Twitter account, and a Web site. Some of them also have a Google Voice number. There are the sentimental few who still have fax machines.
-- Susan Orlean

#Home #Phones #Cells

The genius of a folk melody or story is not the feeling that it's original but quite the opposite - the feeling that it has existed all along.
-- Susan Orlean

#Opposites #Feelings #Genius

I'm happy to be reminded that an ordinary day full of nothing but nothingness can make you feel like you've won the lottery.
-- Susan Orlean

#Ordinary #Like You #Feels

I don't turn to greeting cards for wisdom and advice, but they are a fine reflection of the general drift of the culture.
-- Susan Orlean

#Reflection #Advice #Cards